Free Scandal's Reward by Jean R. Ewing Page B

drowning in it. Captain, you must take your horse and do what you can. Tommy here will show you the way. Amy and I will follow as fast as we can.”
    Morris exchanged one glance with Amelia, then leaped onto his horse and swung the boy up behind him. The ladies, running as best as they might in their long skirts across the rough grass and heather, raced after them. By the time they reached the ridge above the little valley known as the Warrens, Catherine was gasping for breath. Amelia, panting hard, clutched at her sister’s arm. An open crater yawned in the green valley below them.
    “Oh, Cathy, I can’t run another step. I’ve the most dreadful stitch. You go on! Oh, what a horrid scene!”
    Catherine took it all in with one horrified glance. A maze of abandoned tunnels lay beneath this part of the moor. The stone mine buildings had been boarded up long ago, but sheep often sheltered against their ruined walls. The little stream, which had once meandered peacefully past those ruins, had swelled to a torrent in the recent storms. That torrent had cut down through the roof of some underground chamber, making it collapse, then filled the pit to form a deep pool, the water’s surface ten or fifteen feet below the remaining meadow.
    Today the stream had shrunk once again to a rivulet, but its water splashed down into the pool over sides that were gashes of rock and raw earth, as slick, as Tommy had said, as butter.
    And among the clumps of grass and mud floating in the resulting morass, there struggled, bleating piteously, the heavy bodies of Farmer Westcott’s best flock.
    “The first rockfall must have blocked the outlet,” Amy said. “Otherwise the water would have drained away, surely?”
    As she spoke, a large chunk of earth gave way and slumped into the mass of drowning sheep. Amy gasped and put both hands over her mouth.
    “Indeed,” Catherine said grimly. “And that blockage could fail at any moment if the walls keep collapsing like that. In which case, sheep, water, mud and stones will all be sucked down into the deep mine shafts below. We must do what we can to help.”
    For the sheep had not been abandoned to their fate. Farmer Westcott in his homespun smock stood near the edge of the pit, his white hair bright in the sun. Tommy knelt beside him, peering over the edge. Two black-and-white dogs, ears pricked, quivered at their feet, yet lay still.
    Captain Morris had already tied his horse to a tree a safe distance from the disaster.
    A second horse, a gray Thoroughbred, stood idly cropping grass a hundred feet away.
    Morris was now running toward the ruins. A gentleman, stripped to his shirtsleeves, stepped out to meet him. Catherine had no difficulty in recognizing the arrogant turn of the head, or the waves of dark hair. It was Devil Dagonet.
    He called instructions to Westcott and Tommy, who hurried into the ruins to join him, the dogs at their heels. The two gentlemen, dragging one end of a length of thick rope, then ran out to the edge of the crater.
    Catherine slithered on down the hill, leaving Amelia clutching her ribs on the ridge top. This was no time for foolish emotion. She must try to help.
    Dagonet had already belayed the other end of the rope around a heavy timber, set fast in a solid block of masonry. Tommy and Farmer Westcott were jamming some loose boards across the broken walls to form a makeshift pen.
    Catherine stopped, bent double, her breath gone. Dagonet and Morris had their backs to her, and Dagonet was stripping off his boots. No one seemed to have noticed her.
    The drowning flock struggled and fought. Waves slapped against the muddy walls. Large bubbles gulped to the surface.
    Morris caught Dagonet by the arm. “For God’s sake, sir! The whole thing could cave in at any moment. You risk your life for a bunch of dumb sheep.”
    Dagonet wrapped the end of the rope around one hand.
    “Not simply sheep, Captain. What you see there is all of a man’s livelihood and his accumulated